Note: the deep web shouldn’t be confused with the “dark web”, which pertains strictly to pages containing illegal content such as child pornography, terrorist forums, and illegal auctions/transactions. It is estimated that search engines like Google index only 4% of the entire world wide web, meaning that the deep web is nearly 25 times larger than the internet you and I have used our whole lives. If search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing are unable to index the deep web, then how do deep web search engines work? We’ll try to answer this question by first what I mean by “deep web”, then explaining why Google can’t crawl the deep web, and finally looking at how some popular search engines like Ahmia and the Uncensored Hidden Wiki “search” the deep web.Īccording to Google’s online dictionary, the deep web is “ the part of the World Wide Web that is not discoverable by means of standard search engines, including password-protected or dynamic pages and encrypted networks”.

Google Can’t Search the Deep Web, So How Do Deep Web Search Engines Work?

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